Changing priorities for international agricultural research

Abstract

This paper examines the consequences of global changes for publicly supported agricultural research and its implication on research priorities of the CGIAR. The author asks whether the CGIAR has appropriately adjusted its activities in light of these changes and whether the technological and institutional changes of the past decade mean that germplasm conservation, intellectual property protection, and crop management research should be getting more support than varietal development. He argues that the increasingly private nature of crop varieties, driven by the DNA revolution and extension of intellectual property rights to plant, increases the comparative advantage of private research in varietal development. On the other hand, crop mangement retains its public goods nature and there is little likelihood of this changing.